That is the short, strange story of the bullaun stone that once stood within Killynann burial ground in County Wexford, and its disappearance says something quietly unsettling about how easily the physical record of the past can dissolve.

A bullaun stone is a naturally occurring or roughly worked boulder into which one or more cup-shaped depressions, called basins, have been ground, most likely by human hand. They are found across Ireland, often in association with early Christian sites, and the water that collects in their basins was frequently credited with curative or protective properties. The Killynann example was recorded on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a sub-triangular stone, substantial in size at roughly two metres by one point two metres, with a single basin approximately thirty-eight centimetres across and eleven centimetres deep. It sat within the townland's burial ground, which is itself a recorded archaeological site. By the time the site came to be surveyed in more recent decades, the stone could no longer be found. Whether it was removed, buried under shifted ground, or absorbed into some later construction is not known.